Peter Osnos, PublicAffairs Books, at the age
when he was working with I.F. Stone

In late summer 1965, as I.F. Stone scrambled to find a replacement for an assistant
who had landed a job at The New Republic, he took me to lunch at a restaurant in Washington,
D.C.'s small Chinatown. We had, as I recalled, fish with ginger, wrapped in paper and dipped
in boiling water. I was twenty-one and working for the Providence Journal in one of their local
bureaus. Stone offered me $100 per week and said I would earn every penny. I stayed until
the following summer, got a raise to $110 and an education in journalism (or what Izzy
would have called "being a newspaperman") worth millions.

This was a particularly good period, personally and professionally, for Stone and his
four-page I.F. Stone's Weekly. After years of being so hard-of-hearing that he had to wear an
elaborate headset with antenna, making him look like a bespectacled Martian, Izzy's ears had
been repaired by a doctor (Samuel Rosen was his name) who had performed the same operation on
Chairman Mao. Many people would still talk to him as though he was deaf, especially on the
phone, so speaking and listening habits of years duration were being relearned. Even news
gathering was different. Izzy was especially well known for poring through transcripts and
finding nuggets other reporters would miss. Now he could actually hear what was being said
at events like press conferences. Izzy was naturally gregarious and excited to be part of any
and all conversations. But he needed to also retain his relentless pursuit of news, hidden in
the recesses of papers and documents other reporters largely ignored. His restored ears were
both a thrill and a distraction.

The political tenor of the time was also working to his benefit. In the first half of the
1960s, the youthful idealism of the Kennedy years, as expressed in such ways as the Peace
Corps, the Freedom Riders, and sit-ins, was evolving into what soon became the campus-based
anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements. This also coincided with the
emergence of what was known as the New Left. The Old Left of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s
was exhausted by the alliances and battles of that era: the Popular Fronts, for example; the
Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and the Anglo-Soviet-U.S. partnership of World War II's later
years; the sour loyalty tests of the Cold War and McCarthyism; the Soviet invasion of
Hungary in 1956. Six months before the Hungarian upheaval, Izzy visited Moscow and
wrote what turned into one of his most famous citations: "I feel like a swimmer under water
who must rise to the surface or his lungs will burst. Whatever the consequences, I have to
say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the statements of
its leading officials. This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men."
History's view of the Kremlin has hardened considerably over the years, but at the
time, only a decade after the Allies had defeated the Nazis, to break with Moscow in this way
was a radical move—all the more so because Stone did not veer sharply to the anti-
Communist right as so many other apostates of that era did. He held to his convictions
about free expression, human rights, and the dangers of using anti-communism as
justification for war in countries with nationalist aspirations—Vietnam, for instance. These
positions made Izzy especially attractive to the New Left, whose manifestos, like the
Students for a Democratic Society's Port Huron statement of 1962, rejected Communist
orthodoxies but argued for profound social change at home and around the world. Izzy was
already decades older than the students and civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.
But his writing was so vigorous, fresh, and clever that he appealed to this new generation
with humor as well as insight. He was older and wiser, yet still able to identify with the
instincts of the young.

After working for I.F. Stone, Peter Osnos became a correspondent around the world for The Washington Post and the newspaper's foreign and national editor. Later, he was associate publisher and senior editor at Random House and publisher of Random House's Times Books division. In 1997, he founded PublicAffairs, an independent publishing company specializing in books of journalism, history, biography and social criticism which has I.F. Stone as one of its three iconic figures.

PublicAffairs Books, a now famous publishing house, observes on a flyleaf, in each and every book its publishes, that PublicAffairs is a “tribute to the standards, values and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors and book people of all kinds including me”, i.e., Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books.

The three are Benjamin C. Bradlee, Robert L. Bernstein and I.F. Stone. Of the latter, its flyleaf says:

“I.F. Stone, proprietor of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history.”

In a 1969 piece called "In Defense of the Campus Rebels," Izzy wrote, "My boyhood
idol was the saintly anarchist Kropotkin. I looked down on college degrees and felt that a
man should do only what was sincere and true and without thought of mundane
advancement. This provided lofty reasons for not doing homework. I majored in philosophy
with the vague thought of teaching it, but though I revered two of my professors, I disliked
the smell of a college faculty. I dropped out in my third year to go back to newspaper work.
Those were the '20s and I was a pre-depression radical. So I might be described I suppose as
a premature New Leftist, though I never had the urge to burn anything down…." Then,
after affirming his own objections to the intolerance and violence pursued by some in the
antiwar and civil rights movements, he concluded, "I feel about the rebels as Erasmus did
about Luther. Erasmus helped inspire the Reformation but was repelled by the man who
brought it to fruition….I feel that the New Left and the black revolutionaries are doing
God's work, too, in refusing any longer to submit to evil, and challenging society to reform
or crush them."

Izzy entertained his readers and forced them to examine their beliefs. This refusal to
be doctrinaire and his exuberance (despite the sometimes intimidating erudition that went
with it) was a vast asset to his expanding circle of readers. The Weekly's circulation climbed
from 5,000 in 1953 to 70,000 when he ended it in 1971 and shifted his main writing to The
New York Review of Books. He was treasured by his friends, like Bernard Fall, the great
Washington-based French-born expert on Vietnam, whom Izzy admired for his knowledge
and his savoir faire (Fall was killed by a mine in Vietnam in 1967), and Richard Dudman, the
dapper and daring Washington correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who had run-ins
with both the Khmer Rouge and the Viet Cong. But it was a major challenge to be his
assistant.

I was expected to have read thoroughly by 7:30 A.M. The Washington Post, The New
York Times, and several other out-of-town newspapers (though, mercifully, not Le Monde, the
Paris paper that Izzy seemed to most admire). In the course of my day, I would swing by the
Capitol and the State Department to collect handouts, read the wire services, attend hearings
and press conferences, and generally cover the beat that extended, as did Izzy's interests, very
widely. He liked to say "there is a great story hanging from every tree," but to me it seemed
that there were a great many trees. Stone's home and office was at 5618 Nebraska Avenue in
northwest Washington. I worked in the basement, maintained the enormous clip file, and
was summoned upstairs by buzzer. The kitchen was on the way and Izzy's wife, Esther, who
as circulation manager was the Weekly's only other employee, kept a supply of peanut butter
and other snacks in the fridge that maintained my stamina as the day wore on. In the
evening, I digested the Congressional Record and other formidable official publications in
search of revelations. Izzy also encouraged me to write my own pieces and gave me a fistful
of bylines, an honor rarely accorded an apprentice.

Izzy would take the finished Weekly to his printer, McDonald and Eudy, on
Wednesdays and then celebrate with dinner out and a movie. Sometimes Izzy and Esther
went dancing, which they both adored, and for years, their summer routine included
traveling across the Atlantic on oceanliners because they especially enjoyed the nightly
dansants. By Sunday morning Izzy was in full stride again on the next week's issue and so,
therefore, was I. In retrospect, I recognize the enormous benefits and experience I derived
from my year with Izzy, but at the time the long-term gains were obscured by the torrential
work load and the fact that I was too busy to satisfy a growing urge to kick up my own heels
a bit.

Someday when I go through the papers I have stored in various trunks and boxes, I
hope to find the letter Izzy sent me after I left the Weekly. I was working in London as the
assistant editor on The Washington Post's news service and writing occasionally for the paper
as a stringer. (This position, for all its obvious virtues, actually paid less than the Weekly did,
$80 a week). The message of the letter was that having endured my tenure as an assistant, I
was now eligible for friendship. And that is what happened.

Over the next thirty-three years until he died on June 18, 1989, Izzy and I were very
good friends. Once in the late 1960s, I had a book review in the Post of a new work by
Herbert Marcuse, a dense, philosophical tract by a much-admired German émigré icon of
the New Left. Stone told the Post operator to tell me that Marcuse was calling and then, in
his distinctive high-pitched voice, tried to impersonate a German accent. When I challenged
the caller's identity, he feigned outrage that I would critique him in the newspaper and then
defy him on the phone. I was, among other things, very flattered that Izzy had noticed the
piece. Over the next decade as I worked abroad for The Washington Post in Vietnam and
Moscow, Izzy would take me to lunch whenever I was in town, often at a favorite restaurant
called the Piccadilly on Upper Connecticut Avenue. He was very careful about his weight,
but insisted that I order and eat the dessert trifle—which he would not.

One of our last sustained encounters was around his eightieth birthday in 1989. I had
the idea of renting Town Hall and having a celebratory evening in his honor. I had
approached several of Izzy's other admirers, including the publishers of The Nation magazine,
The New York Review, and Pantheon Books at Random House, and raised the cost of renting
the venue. I called to tell him the news and get some dates.

"You sure are a pistol, Pete," he said. "I never should have let you go." But then he
pointed out that one of his principal sources of income at that time was public speaking so
that rather than a "charity" event, he would prefer the occasion be observed at a place where
admission would be charged and he could receive the proceeds.

I.F. Stone liked people, especially, and particularly his readers, but he did prefer that they were a little uncomfortable as they wrestled with the eternal nature of certain problems in contemporary life.

The evening was eventually
held at the New School. The moderator was Nation Editor-in-Chief Victor Navasky and it
was a sell-out. When Stone died in 1989, Esther and Izzy's two sons, Jeremy and
Christopher, and their daughter, Celia, asked me to organize the memorials in Washington
and New York. We selected the Ethical Society auditorium on Central Park West and the
Friends Meeting House in Washington. Izzy was a Jew, of course, but his religion was
humanism, even though he did invoke God, as in the piece quoted above. The cover of the
program for the memorials was a syndicated cartoon by Pat Oliphant. It is St. Peter at the
Pearly Gates on the phone, talking to a higher authority, with Stone, holding a pencil and
notebook standing by. St. Peter is saying, "Yes, that I.F. Stone, Sir. He says he doesn't want
to come in—he'd rather hang around out here, and keep things honest."
The New York event was on a warm day and the air conditioning at the Ethical
Society was barely functioning. Many in the crowd were fanning themselves and one woman
ostentatiously took out a battery-powered fan to cool off. Sensing the mood and as the
presider, I took off my jacket and said, "Sorry about the temperature, but I'm sure that on an
occasion such as this, Izzy would prefer that we were all a little uncomfortable." Thinking
about that comment now, I'd go even further. I.F. Stone liked people, especially, and
particularly his readers, but he did prefer that they were a little uncomfortable as they
wrestled with the eternal nature of certain problems in contemporary life. Reading this
collection, so well edited by Karl Weber, I see that we are still coping with the same issues
today as we did fifty years ago, when I.F. Stone's Weekly was launched: nuclear weapons,
religious and ethnic fundamentalism, racial bias, and the instinctively repressive and/or
dissembling nature of so many governments. A first-rate biography of Izzy being published
this fall by Myra MacPherson is called All Governments Lie. The rest of the quote is, "But
disaster lies in wait for those countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give
out." In the Vietnam era, Izzy parsed government statements to reveal the reality of what
was happening in the war. He would be equally robust today in unraveling the justifications
and, subsequently, rationalizations for the Bush administration's forays into Iraq and
Afghanistan.

What makes this collection of The Best of I.F. Stone valuable is that it seems so relevant
to our times. Some aspects of language have changed: calling oneself a "newspaperman"
seems quaint in today's media-driven, gender-neutral world, but otherwise, Stone's wisdom,
informing his perceptions and framing his arguments, reads with spectacular currency. One
small measure of Izzy's lasting influence can be found in a quintessential twenty-first
exercise. If you type in "I.F. Stone" on Google, you come up with 237,000 items. That is an
impressive amount for what Izzy described in 1963 as a "four-page miniature journal of
news and opinion," a publication long gone, but clearly not forgotten.